Here Lies Gloria Mundy

Sez you! I thought grimly, swallowing in order to rid myself of my horrid feeling of nausea. The attendant drew back the sheet from the face, or what had been the face. It was blackened and quite unrecognisable. The feature referred to twice by the inspector was only too plain to see, however. On the otherwise unidentifiable head of the corpse was the slightly scorched red and black hair which was what I thought of as the trademark of Gloria Mundy. The inspector covered up the horror which lay on the mortuary slab and led me away from it.

‘Well, sir?’ he said, with a briskness which I suppose was an indication that I must pull myself together.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t know, I’m sure. It’s — there’s nothing to go on but the hair, and that doesn’t make sense, does it?’

‘No, sir?’

‘I mean, if the head is — is like that, the hair ought to be shrivelled right up and you wouldn’t see the two colours and all that, would you?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine, sir, so if I may know what your verdict is?’

‘Oh, the identification. I suppose the body is that of Gloria Mundy, but — ’

‘You need go no further, sir. Thank you for your help.’

All was not yet over. We were taken to the police station, where Anthony was escorted to the interview room and I was given a seat opposite the desk sergeant’s counter. He asked me whether I would like a cup of tea. I thought this apparently kind suggestion was an indication that I might need to be fortified against my next ordeal.

I refused the tea and asked whether I had long to wait. He answered, in the elliptical manner of which the police are pastmasters, that these things took a little time. He offered me a newspaper to read.

I took it and thanked him, but it is hardly necessary to say that, although I looked at it for courtesy’s sake, I did not read a single word. I was still wondering what Anthony had thought when he was shown Gloria’s hair and her ravaged face, and what he was saying at that moment in the interview room.

At last it was my turn. They led Anthony past me and saw him out and then a constable touched me on the arm and said, ‘This way, sir.’ In the interview room he positioned himself against the door. The inspector was not there. A mild-looking man in plain clothes gave me a seat opposite him at a table, drew a writing-pad towards himself, took up a ballpoint and said, with what I thought (with even worse misgivings than before) was a kind of gruesome cheerfulness, ‘Well, now, sir, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty, shall we? Then we can both have our lunch.’

‘I suppose it’s no good to ask you what my friend has told you,’ I said.

‘The same as I hope you are going to tell me, sir. You say that you recognised the body as being that of a Miss Gloria Mundy. How well did you know her?’

‘Only well enough to recognise her rather unusual two-coloured hair. She was my fellow guest at lunch a few days ago.’

‘The lunch being where, sir?’

‘At Mr Wotton’s house. I had been invited to pay him a visit and Miss Mundy turned up unexpectedly and was offered lunch. She took umbrage at the table manners of another guest and left before the end of the meal. I never saw her alive again, and I had never met her before that day.’

He pushed a writing-pad towards me. Another plain-clothes man had been making notes at a small table in a corner of the room.

‘Would you read what the detective-sergeant has written down, sir, and sign it as a true report of what you have told me?’

That was all. I was thanked — the deadly courtesy of the English police is far more terrifying than the bullying methods adopted by some other Forces — and Anthony and I were driven back to Beeches Lawn. Celia was anxious to know what had happened.

‘I don’t like it,’ she said, when she heard what Anthony had to say. ‘As for that awful Gloria, if she had been camping out there, somebody would have seen her and told us. What about Platt and the boy who helps him in the garden?’

‘They can’t have seen anybody, or they would have mentioned it. All the same, the police found empty tins in the cellar to back up their story about squatters. Now we know it was Gloria, she must have been living there.’

‘Those things could have been down there for years. There’s no water or lighting or sanitation in the old house. People couldn’t live there. The dreadful thing is that, if there were no squatters, somebody else killed Gloria. You and Corin had to say you knew her. They’ll probe — the police, I mean — and goodness knows what they’ll come up with. How well did you know her?’

‘I told you ages ago. I had a lighthearted flirtation with her. It was nothing more. I met her on a Mediterranean cruise. She only wanted to get free drinks on board and her shore outings paid for. I was the unattached member of my party, so I went along with her.’

‘Old Hara-kiri seems to have had the same sort of experience,’ I said, backing him up. ‘Gloria seems to have been adept at picking out the suckers,’ I added, less graciously.